Luther Dunphy has further stated that he will not participate in any trial for it is only God’s judgment that applies to him. But, he has stated that he will “not contest” his legal situation. He has told Reverend Kuhn that he does not wish donations to a defense fund but asks his supporters to “pray for him.”
With difficulty Darren read these words. Not for the first time he read these words, and not for the last time. His eyes misted over, irritably he wiped away tears.
“‘May your soul rot in Hell.’ That’s my prayer, fucker.”
CHILDREN OF THE DECEASED
He’d said There is no evil.
We could not believe him now.
STUNNED AND TRANCELIKE those days pushing through a scrim of something clotted like the mucus that sticks eyelashes together and blurs vision.
Not for a long time was it believable that our father had died for there was always the possibility that the phone would ring and it would be Daddy. Or, Daddy would come home unannounced—just walk in the door.
“Hey kids! Hiya.”
It was a possibility that might come to you light and magical as a hummingbird whose tiny wings vibrate so rapidly you cannot really see them even as you knew (you had been told) that he was ashes now—bits of bone, ashes.
(You had not seen the ashes. But you knew Gus Voorhees is ashes now.)
The paradox was: he’d always traveled so frequently. So it was logical, if Dad was gone, Dad was elsewhere.
As our mother complained he was gone all the time—and so, Daddy was traveling or was at the new place in Ohio but would certainly come home. Sometime.
With a part of our mind we understood He is dead, he is gone. He is not coming home. He is ashes. But this part of our mind could not always prevail.
It was a terrible thing, our mother had caused our father to be burnt to ashes. Our mother had made this decision without consulting us. She had made this decision because (as she said) Gus had always spoken positively of cremation—or rather, he’d spoken disdainfully of conventional burial.
The funeral service in Ann Arbor, we’d attended. We were dazed, uncertain. We had not seen our father’s body, for by that time, our father’s body had been cremated.
His ashes were in an urn approximately two feet high made of a dark earthen material. No one could seriously believe that Gus Voorhees could fit into that urn! It was fascinating to observe because you knew it could not be so which fed the idea (that thrived in the interstices of adults’ attention when your mind skidded and careened like a runaway vehicle on a steep mountain road) that our father was somewhere else, our father was alive (of course) somewhere else and would return to us when he wished.
Katechay Island—this was where Daddy’s ashes should be scattered.
When we told our mother she seemed scarcely to hear us. She had made plans for our father’s ashes to be buried in an Ann Arbor cemetery—the suggestion had been made to her by friends for whom a specific place, a site, a grave for Gus Voorhees seemed crucial.
Darren protested, “Dad’s ashes should be scattered on Katechay Island because that’s what he wanted. He loved the island and he was happy there. Then we could come visit him anytime.”
Our mother stared at Darren. Her mouth worked as if she meant to smile but could not. In the careful voice we knew to be her “headache voice” (which meant that Jenna was trying very hard to keep a mild throbbing pain from blossoming into migraine) she told him Katechay was not practical at the present time—“It’s a long drive to the island. It would be a very depressing drive. I don’t feel strong enough to attempt it. And no one would ever go there to ‘visit.’”
Stubbornly Darren said, “I would! I would go to visit.”
When our mother did not reply Darren persisted: “The point is, Dad would want his ashes scattered there. In a beautiful place. I think he would.”
“He wouldn’t have wanted it. He wasn’t the type. He hated theatrical gestures.”
Our mother spoke with a sob in her voice, not of grief (Darren thought) but of anger. Prudently, he retreated.
But next morning Darren brought up the subject again and this time our mother interrupted him to say that the matter was “settled”—our father’s ashes were to be buried, in the urn, in the cemetery just two miles from the McMahans’ house where we’d been staying.
“Jesus, Mom! I think—”
“Please. There is nothing more to discuss.”
Our mother moved to slip past Darren but Darren blocked her way. For a tense moment he looked as if he might shove her, or shout into her face, and our mother was frightened, but did not step aside; it was Darren who turned, and ran out of the room cursing her—God damn you, I hate you.
Cautiously Naomi stepped back out of their mother’s range of vision. She’d learned that, since their father’s death, their mother did not seem to see quite so well as she had; it was like her to miss a step descending stairs, and to almost stumble; though her eyes were open, her attention was elsewhere. Naomi was disturbed that her brother had said such terrible things to their mother and yet a childish part of her was satisfied too.
If you had loved Daddy more, he wouldn’t have left us. None of this would have happened. You are to blame, I hate you too.
“NAOMI? WHAT IS IT?”
“What is what?”
“You seem always to be—well, clearing your throat—and your voice has been hoarse for days . . .”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
“Do you have a sore throat, or—a cold? . . .”
Furious, Naomi slammed out of the room. She could not bear it, such close scrutiny which angered her even more than its reverse—our mother’s distraction.
Soon after our father’s disappearance from our lives—(which she did not exactly acknowledge to be death)—Naomi began to feel her throat constrict at unpredictable times. It was silly, like coughing and sputtering, very annoying, embarrassing. She had difficulty swallowing and could not speak always clearly. She felt a curious sensation in her mouth like Novocain. Her tongue felt swollen, and was very tender.
If she tried to speak, her voice was hoarse and inaudible; soon she gave up trying. She saw her surroundings at a remove as if looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Often she saw people speaking to her but could not hear them. She was in dread of beginning school in this new place where no one knew her though everyone knew whose daughter she was.
The abortionist’s daughter. Her father was killed.
There was something wrong inside her mouth. Contorting her face before a mirror she could see—almost—an ugly black stitching in her tongue, that rendered speech painful. How had such a thing happened!
The mutilation of her mouth was confused (somehow) with what had happened to our father in Ohio. Shotgun blast. Point-blank. Upper chest, throat, lower face devastated. (How did Naomi know this? Somehow, she knew. She and Darren knew far more than the naive adults surrounding them could have guessed.)
Often, Naomi approached Darren just to be near him. She assured him he didn’t have to talk to her, he didn’t have to acknowledge her, she would not intrude in whatever he was doing—(at his computer); she just did not want to be alone. “Play with Melissa,” Darren said negligently, “she needs you.” But Naomi did not want to be needed, she had not enough strength.
And how insulting to her, her grief snubbed by her brother as if play might be a remedy.
Naomi seemed to Darren exactly wrong in all ways. She was too old for childish behavior and yet too young to be taken seriously as a teenager. She had nothing of the funky-sexy chic of certain Ann Arbor schoolgirls of her age who were as likely to be Asian, Caribbean-American, Hispanic, Eastern European as Caucasian; these were the American-born children of university professors and research scientists who knew how to wear tight jeans, tight little “tops” and sparkly sneakers, how even to disguise blotched skin as poor Naomi never would. It was adolescent-boy disgust Darren preferred to feel for his sister
rather than dismay: her skin was both blotched and chalky-white.
More seriously, there were purplish crescents beneath her eyes. She had acquired a habit of swallowing compulsively as if her mouth were very dry and often when she tried to speak her voice was hoarse, scarcely audible.
“Go away. Don’t follow me around. It’s God damned depressing just to see you.”
“But—”
“I am not you. Get that!”
His grief he carried secure in his arms as you would carry an explosive device that is very delicately primed to detonate.
His grief was precious to him. His sister’s grief was excruciating, unbearable.
IN ANN ARBOR in the snowy fields beyond the McMahans’ house where he prowled by night. In secret slipping from the darkened house to run, run, run like a furious goat—a ram with curled, lethal horns—until his heart beat hard with a kind of angry jubilance.
Such secret times, Darren plotted revenge.
His brain was bright with fire. He imagined that his eyes, glimpsed from a little distance, were flame.
Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
He’d have liked (he thought) to travel to Ohio, to seek out the Dunphys.
The Dunphy son who was his approximate age. He’d have liked to murder him.
It would not be difficult to set a house on fire, in the night. You would sprinkle kerosene around the foundation of the house, you would encircle the house completely so that no one could escape.
Then, you would strike a match. You would toss the match.
You would run, run, run until your heart burst.
HE DID FEEL BETTER IF he ran until he was exhausted. It gave him great happiness that no one knew where he was.
His lungs sucked in air. His heart scuttled inside his chest like a trapped, frantic rat. He knew, he’d disappointed the McMahans. They had opened their household to the remnants of Gus Voorhees’s family but it was not working out as they’d hoped. Especially, Darren was not accessible to them though he was Leonard McMahan’s godson.
What the fuck does that even mean—godson?
Some whim of his father’s. The men had been old, close friends like brothers—Gus Voorhees, Lenny McMahan. But what had that to do with him?
Some nights, he ran for miles until his legs ached. Craned his neck staring at the night sky as if he’d never seen it before. Scattered stars, so many pinpricks of light! Once, his father had told him of a conviction he’d had as a boy peering at an anatomical text, marveling at the musculature of the human body, that the personal life was a means to bring us to the impersonal, larger life—the life of science, of an objective and shared truth; and there was tremendous solace in that, in the impersonal.
“The ‘impersonal’ is our salvation. It is where we all meet—it breaks the solitude of the self.”
Darren wanted to believe this. But his skin chafed with grief, and fury at this grief; his heart was an open wound. Much of the time he was thinking—without knowing what he was thinking—that his father he’d loved had betrayed him.
Yet there was the possibility, somewhere in the night sky—It has not happened yet, on one of those stars.
In his favorite graphic novel titled ZeroTimeZero time was sliced into strips winding through the universe. There were fleets of vast space cruisers the size of the Queen Mary filled with individuals seeking their lost lives. Something had gone wrong, time had become fragmented and slivered and no longer linear. It was perfectly plausible in such a universe that something that was past tense on one planet was future tense on another. The same individual was dead, alive, not-yet-born simultaneously.
You could search through distant galaxies in one of the space cruisers, for eternity. What kept you going was the faith that whatever you sought existed, somewhere.
VOICE MAIL
She would not return to the rented farmhouse on Salt Hill Road for some time. She would not bring the children until it was unavoidable—of course they had to retrieve their belongings, their clothes. There were documents, legal and financial records. There were (never unpacked) boxes of books. They had to “close up” the house for which the widow of Gus Voorhees was still obliged to pay monthly rent though the thought of living in the house again was vile and repugnant to her as if her husband had died in the house and not hundreds of miles away.
Seeing the cheerless house from the road they were paralyzed with dread. Melissa began to whimper, Jenna groped for the little girl’s mittened hand to comfort her. In the backseat Darren whispered what sounded like Jesus! Fuck. Naomi was very still.
“Wouldn’t you wonder who might live in such a place? Why would anyone live in such a place?”
In the aftermath of our father’s death it was like our mother to make such remarks as if she were thinking out loud. We understood that her questions were not true questions but Naomi ventured an answer.
“People have to live somewhere, Mom.”
“Exactly! Until one day they don’t.”
Our mother didn’t have a plan for us to begin moving from the house that day. She had failed to bring packing boxes or suitcases. She had not discussed the house with us as she had not discussed the future with us except in the most pragmatic of terms—next week, tomorrow. Day after tomorrow. The house on Salt Hill Road she referred to tersely as the house in the country. It seemed to the older children (who monitored their mother’s behavior covertly) that in speaking of the house in the country Jenna sometimes did not recall the actual name of the township, the road.
As we would hear our mother speak of my husband as if she’d forgotten or mislaid our father’s name or found the name too painful to speak as it was too painful to hear.
In a pleading voice, Naomi said, “We’re not getting out, Mom—are we? Nothing has been plowed.”
Our mother laughed. It was a sound like breaking twigs.
“Did you imagine we would drive this distance to sit in the car? Of course we’re getting out.”
With great effort we made our way through the snow, that came to our knees; even Melissa was not allowed to remain in the warm car but had to come with us, fitting her tiny booted feet in the impressions made by our larger boots. (“I can’t let you stay in the car with the motor running. There’s a danger of toxic fumes.”)
It was a misty winter afternoon. You could not have said if you were fully awake or whether this was the continuation of a dream. All color was bleached to the hue of bone marrow except for the rust-red of a few wizened crab apples on stunted trees beside the house. Darren had gone first to help clear the way for the others and on the back steps he stamped his feet hard, and kicked at the snow. His face was tight-knotted, furious. Clumps of snow fell from the farmhouse roof onto our heads.
“Give me the key, Mom. Christ!”
Darren forced the door open, that led into the kitchen. More snow fell from above. Naomi who’d had difficulty sleeping since her father’s death half-shut her eyes seeing (not for the first time but more vividly than usual) a snowy-white bird, a predator-bird, in this case an owl, beak and talons shining, swooping at her face.
Naomi had learned to cringe protectively from such (feigned) assaults without actually—literally—cringing so that others could see. It was a skill she’d newly developed, in which she took the most pathetic pride.
“Just go inside, Darren. We’re right behind you.”
Our mother nudged Darren forward. Naomi and Melissa followed.
The interior of the old farmhouse appeared to be considerably colder than the outside air. The rooms appeared to be smaller—(Naomi was put in mind of rooms in a dollhouse, except in this case there were not dolls but human inhabitants). The rooms were untidy as if a strong wind had blown through them. A scrim of pathos hung over all. (Naomi tried not to think—Somebody has died here.)
No one wanted to go upstairs. Many of his clothes remained, he had not taken them with him to Ohio. Pairs of shoes, useless and terrible to behold.
In the bottom dra
wer of a bureau, a jumble of heavy woolen hiking socks. An old wallet, leather worn thin and inside, a very old U-M ID card. Augustus Voorhees U-M Medical School.
None of the Voorhees children wished to search out possessions, clothes, schoolbooks left behind in the hasty departure of early November.
(Our mother had withdrawn us from the St. Croix schools. We would not ever return of course. In our mother’s mind it sometimes seemed that our father had died not in the driveway of the women’s shelter in Ohio but in the driveway of the women’s shelter in St. Croix and often the two were commingled in our minds as well.)
(We would be enrolled in Ann Arbor public schools, in January 2000. We would continue to live with the McMahans until our mother made a firm decision where we would live permanently.)
(But was anything “permanent” now? Not one of the remaining family thought so.)
Floorboards creaked beneath our boots like breaking ice. We winced as if we were in danger. Our breaths steamed faintly—this was proof of being alive!
Our mother said, musing, “It is like being ghosts, isn’t it?—returning to a mausoleum where they’d come from.”
Since our father had died and she’d been driven to Muskegee Falls, Ohio, to identify what are called remains, our mother was not the person we remembered.
The elder children were particularly conscious of this change in Jenna. Naomi reached surreptitiously into her mouth to touch the rough stitches in her tongue, taking a kind of solace in seeing yes, the stitches were there.
A Book of American Martyrs Page 23